Simple formula. Buried lines are more expensive to bury and install. They are harder to replace. They are subject to damage along the entire length (other diggers, moles, excavation, erosion, electrolisis, etc. They do not disipate heat as well when they are buried. Buried cables mean higher electric bills. Take your pick.

It's all about the heat dispersal. And the cities are already so congested underground that adding electric would be suicide.

Read the New Yorker by candlelight when the overheads are down. Pretend its 1650 in some foggy English village, the melody of the millers waterwheel sloshing away nearby. Call in a strapping tart for a bit of diversion.

"I takes a village" to man up America. The villages are gone. The teeming masses in the city won't take a 3 year tear up of their street - the SUV gets too dusty, and a 30 second wait is cause for a shooting.

When an overhead goes down, its hours to find and fix. When the underground wire melts, its days and weeks.

I would love to man up America. But the closest we have come is the prison gang chainsawing brush along my mountain road.

Chaingangs. Use the VAST prison population and show them how good it is to sweat for a reason other than a hold-up or a shank fight.

I am still not sure that I feel comfortable using unpaid labor to do skilled work like that.

Let's use tax dollars. That's what taxes are there for.

Like you, Ballvalve, I also feel a little sad that the English no longer run the show here.

We did send a few miscreants here, however. From which, some of you may well be descended.

The criminals we sent to America were, of course, not our brightest and best. Many were sold as servants as soon as they landed here (unlike in Australia where they were made to work in the penal colony). In buying them, owners looked for particular skill sets that they could use on their plantations.

So, in a previous life I did worked for the power company maintaining all of those dang above ground power lines. I was one of the guys that fixed the lines when the tree branches knocked them down. My company would have buried the lines in a heart beat, but the cost would have been ASTRONOMICAL!! For the few power outages that could have been prevented by burying the lines we would have had to dig up every backyard in the city, and reinstall every house's power box. (and as you well know once you modify something you have to bring it up to current code) Oh, and those same power poles also carry everyone's phone and cable service. So all of that would have to be buried as well. But, even back then, 30 years ago, all of the new neighborhoods were being built with underground power.

I decided to quit when, like the days before it, I was 40' in the air in a high lift bucket truck, looking at a high tension line only a few feet away. I realized that I could touch death without even trying. Be thankful someone will do that job. I have done it and I am thankful.

I live 14 kilometres from town so nothing out here is buried except for the last 300 feet from the pole to my house. I much prefer the clean look of no overhead wires.

My internet comes to me through the air and so doesn't rely on wires. Mind you, without electricity the batteries in my UPS and my laptop will run down as too will the UPS on the WISP's tower. I work in IT and am on-call 24/7 every other week so I need VPN access back to my place of work. The first thing I do in a power outage is to VPN in to see if the outage afected the town also, and whether the backup generators started.

The electrical utility here is pretty good at recovering from lightning induced outages and reclosers take care of most of them. It's the trees falling onto lines and the drivers plowing into the poles that cause the extended outages. While I have a genset for backup power, the WISP tower does not, so once their UPS depletes, I can no longer access the internet and cannot VPN to mey network. Mind you, once the tower UPS depletes, my cellphone also stops working so I tend not to get so many calls.